An Outline of Methodological Afrocentrism, with Particular Application to the Thought of W. E. B. DuBois

Abstract

An Outline of Methodological Afrocentrism, with Particular Application to the Thought of W. E. B. DuBois Kenneth W. Stikkers I begin with a challenge. The American Philosophical Association recently disclosed that over the last five years only 1.1 percent of all American Ph.D.s in philosophy were awarded to Africans or African Americans, exactly the same percentage as in 1980!1 Moreover, philosophy continues to be one of the disciplines in the academy in which African Americans are least represented. I challenge anyone to offer publicly a nonracist explanation for this condition. By nonracist I mean an explanation that neither is itself racist—for example, does not suggest that African American students are inferior in some way—nor admits racist attitudes or practices in the profession. Methodological Afrocentrism is intended as an antidote to the intellectual colonialism that undergirds and serves to legitimate political and economic colonialism. In the following I will, first, explain what I mean by "intellectual colonialism" and how it adversely affects the reading of Africana philosophy; second, delineate the central features of "methodological Afrocentrism"; and, third, illustrate the method, and how it aims to overcome intellectual colonialism, in the reading of the African American thinker W. E. B. DuBois. Among the conditions of colonialism is that the colonized must speak, if they are allowed to speak publicly at all, through the language and conceptual schemas of the colonizer; they must thereby validate, as a prerequisite for speaking publicly, both in form and in substance, the colonizer's intellectual enframement of the world, reinforce the colonizer's worldview and rationality as the universally valid ones. That is, in order to speak publicly the colonized must flatter the colonizer and in the process, simultaneously, denigrate his or her own cultural traditions. Indeed, European efforts to legitimate philosophically its colonialist practices were rooted largely in the presumption of a universal reason, of which Europe further presumed itself to be the most advanced expression. Those being colonized then were imagined to lie either at the earliest dawn of that reason or altogether outside [End Page 40] its history. Colonial powers, thus, as the self-proclaimed vanguards of such reason, imagined and projected themselves as the liberators of non-European "savages," freeing them from their unreason by placing them under, not their (the colonizers') interests and fancies, but the rule of the one true and universally valid Reason itself. Hegel's pronouncement regarding Africa is perhaps the bluntest: "Africa . . . is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit. . . . What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature" (1956, 99). Karl Marx first noted how the presumption of universal reason served to legitimate oppression, although he did so with respect to class rather than race: "Each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interests as the common interest of all the members of society. . . . It will give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones" (1904, 298–99, in Marcuse 1960, 285). And, to the best of my knowledge, it was William James who, as co-founder, along with Jane Addams, of the Anti-imperialist League and outspoken critic of American imperialism, first identified the intimate connection between the universal reason presumed by Western science and philosophy, on the one hand, and Western colonialist practices, on the other, and his pluralism thus served as an antidote to the universalistic presumptions of imperialism. Colonizers self-righteously believed themselves to be not oppressors but saviors, transforming the presumably "irrational," "lazy," "inefficient," "unproductive" darker races into efficient instruments of rational economic production, within growingly global markets. Colonizers could thus imagine themselves not as privileged but as "burdened"—bearers of "the white man's burden."2 As the king presumes to speak for his entire kingdom, so colonizers presume to speak for all humanity, that the way they see and order things is the way in which all creatures who wish to be deemed "rational" and "civilized" must see and order...